It’s amazing to think that if we were here on holiday we would be packing our bags and getting on a plane back home tomorrow. The first two weeks have passed in what feels like the blink of an eye, and a flurry of hard work and exploration of the city.

In terms of my project I have been able to boil down a list of over 40,000 potential prospects for Liberty Mutual’s Group savings Plus partnership to a much more manageable 2000. Now the real work starts in terms of finding out as much as possible about the organizations and deciding whether or not they are a good fit with the Liberty Mutual program. I have to admit that I have never found Insurance to be a particularly captivating area of business but I have to say that in the process of working out whether we would like to form a partnership with a certain organization I have been exposed to all of the criteria which is used to decide if it would be a good fit. This ranges from simple things like education, income and age to the more surprising such as shift pattern and other lifestyle elements. Liberty also put a great emphasis on their previous experiences with groups and professions and some of the groups which make a bad risk are actually very surprising.

During the course of the week we also had the privilege of meeting for lunch with Helen Sayles, the head of HR at Liberty Mutual and a trustee at the Saltire Foundation. Helen had some very interesting opinions on the business community in Scotland and shared with us how she saw the Saltire interns making a tangible difference to the economy when we enter the world of work. The cornerstone of her vision for this is that we develop the can-do attitude which seems to be very much more prevalent in the USA than back home in Scotland. It may sound cheesy, but, there is a definite difference in how things are done here, and most importantly things do get done, there seems to be less red tape and prohibitive legislation and certainly in Liberty Mutual a distinct lack of blame culture. This leads to an environment where more ideas are tested, if they don’t work then that’s good, because they now know that they won’t work, and if they do, great, they can be rolled out on a larger scale. I believe that if this culture was transferred into any Scottish company it would be a change for the better and allow our already successful business sector to become even more of a force on the global scale.

Anyway, I’m sorry if I have went on a bit, I’m just glad I’m working here now and not still in my previous job as a squirrel.

Hope all the other interns are having as good a time as I am here in Boston.

Allan